Archive for 2014

Here I come to announce the recipients of this monthâs donations, and the announcement is going to be quick, since Iâm knee-deep in the process of setting up a new server for my company.

And speaking of my company, this month Iâm supporting an open source project that has served me and my team for more than four years â OpenLDAP, the free LDAP implementation. It lets us have a single authorization mechanism for numerous applications that weâre using in our daily work (like Redmine or GitLab), making life much easier.

The second donation that Iâm making this month goes to the Pegasus Foundation.

Last month I thought I was being as busy as humanly possible, but life proved me wrong — this month I’m even more busy. So, I’m just posting this quick last minute note about this month’s donations.

The open source project that I’m supporting this month is Tracks, the Getting Things Done web application built in Ruby on Rails. I have been using it for more than two years now (I already made a donation to the project back in July 2012) and I highly value its simplicity and usefulness.

My second donation goes to the “Sfora” Foundation in Warsaw, dedicated to helping stray and mistreated dogs. This is the third time that I’m supporting them, and the two previous donations were also made in September, so I guess I can now officialy consider “Sfora” a regular donation recipient for the month of September.

Having way too much work? Check. Making the monthly donations at the last moment before the end of the month? Check. So everything is in order, let’s get to it.

Today I’m making a donation to the LibreOffice project, and this is the second time that I’m supporting them — the first time was in December 2012. LibreOffice continues to be one of the most important software packages that I use almost every day, thanks to the joys of running a small business and thus constantly having to deal with text documents and spreadsheets. Although I would very much prefer not having to do that and just play with source code, that’s how it is, and at least LibreOffice makes it bearable. Thank you once again, the Document Foundation!

Uhh, I got swamped with work and almost didn’t make it in time with the monthly donations! I only have minutes left till the inevitable end of July, so I better get right to it.

This month I’m supporting the FreeBSD Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting the development of the FreeBSD operating system and the community around it. I have been using FreeBSD for years on several machines, including the very server that this website is running on, so this donation is in gratitude for all that time that FreeBSD has served me so well. Thank you, Beastie!

I’m also making a donation to the “Gift of Heart” Foundation, located in Krakow, devoted to helping homeless and abused animals — this is the second time that I’m supporting them, the first time being back in 2012. I wish all the best to the Foundation staff, and to all the animals under their care.

I’m blogging from the scene of destruction and havoc that used to be my apartment, but it’s currently undergoing renovation and this is what it’s turned into. There is dust everywhere, the furniture is all over the place, and I’m having trouble finding my way around. In short, it’s like a major rewrite of a large code base, but in real life.

Anyway, some renovation-shmenovation won’t stop me from continuing the initiative of monthly donations — so here we go. It has become a tradition of its own that June is the month when I support Dancer, my favorite Perl web framework, which I use both for work and for my personal projects with great joy. This year is no exception, and with my donation to the project I’m sending the well-deserved big thanks to the developers and maintainers of the project.

The second donation that I’m making this month goes to the “Friends to the Animals” Foundation, based in Katowice (whom I also support regularly — the previous time was in November last year). Their mission is to help mistreated and abandoned animals and to raise awareness of animal welfare issues, and I know they are truly dedicated to their cause. Thank you for your great work, Friends to the Animals!

This month marks the second anniversary of Operation “Monthly Donations”, which I started back in May 2012. Since then, every month I have made a small donation to an open source project (or an organization that supported the open source movement in some way), and to a charity organization or other good cause.

Like I did last year, celebrating the first anniversary, Iâm sending this monthâs donations to the same recipients that I supported at the very beginning â the Perl Foundation, which stands behind my beloved programming language, and âPrzystan Ocalenieâ, the great people who run an animal shelter for horses saved from slaughter and other animals that suffered from abuse or abandonment.

As the glorious tradition goes, Iâm doing another round of monthly donations supporting open source projects and charity organizations, and per a slightly less glorious tradition, Iâm doing this on the lastest day of the month.

This monthâs open source project that Iâm supporting is one small utility that is so common that I found it hard to even think of it as a project of its own, it seems like an elemental component of every operating system that Iâm using these days. And if youâre reading this on Linux or Mac OS X, itâs pretty likely that you use it all the time as well, because Iâm talking about Sudo, the program that gives you great power whenever you need it.

Sudo is mostly used to gain root privileges, but it can do much more than just that — itâs highly configurable and gives you fine-grained control over whoâs allowed to run which commands.

Update from last month’s post: things haven’t slowed down yet like I hoped they would, and I still haven’t had the time to return to my precious projects. But the day will come, and it will come soon. Now, let’s do this month’s donations.

The open source project that Iâm supporting this month is Nginx, the web/proxy server thatâs famous for its performance. It’s currently the second or third (depending on how you count) most widely used web server on the planet. Over the past few years, I’ve personally witnessed how its popularity increased based on the web projects that I’ve been participating in — more and more often, Nginx was being chosen as the web server to run the project on. To Nginx project team — congratulations and keep up the great work!

By the way, the fine FLOSS Weekly podcast covered Nginx in one of the recent episodes — I recommend it if you want to learn a bit more about this project and where it’s headed.

The second donation that Iâm making this month is to a cause that I already supported a year ago, and that is the WWF Poland Lynx Campaign. Itâs an initiative of the Polish office of WWF to restore the population of lynx in the Mazury region in Poland. Since March last year, they have introduced three new lynxes to the Mazurian woods. I’m glad to know they are moving forward with their efforts and I wish them best of luck.

My blog is temporarily in sleep mode with just the donation announcements coming up every month — I’m sorry about that, but I’m swamped with work and have zero time for writing posts or for my personal projects. Hopefully, in March things will slow down a bit and I’ll have some time to get back to that.

Anyway, it is the time for this month’s donations. The first organization that I’m donating to is the OpenBSD Foundation, and it’s yet another long-deserved donation, as I’m an everyday user of the two main products that are supported by the Foundation — OpenBSD and OpenSSH. An OpenBSD machine acts as a gateway in my home network, and pretty much every machine that I use is running OpenSSH. So, guys, thanks for being with me all the time and keeping my network activities secure!

I’m also sending a donation to the “Little Claw” Foundation (not to be confused with “Cat’s Claw” that I supported last month), which helps stray cats by neutering them and finding them new homes. Some time ago I had the pleasure of speaking with the Foundation’s director, and I know the people behind it are truly dedicated to their cause. I wish them all the best in their efforts.

Once again I’m doing the monthly donations on the very last day of the month. I wonder if there’s a badge for a master procrastinator… Alright, let’s get down to business.

The open source project that I’m donating to this month is Transmission, the popular BitTorrent client, initially released back in 2005. Highly renowned for its stability and low resource usage, it’s currently the default BitTorrent client on a number of Linux distributions. I happily use it both on a Linux desktop and on a MacBook.

The second of this month’s donations is to the “Cat’s Claw” Foundation in Poznan, formed in 2006, which is committed to providing help to stray animals — mostly cats, as the name suggests. It’s the second time that I’m supporting the Foundation, the first time was a year ago.

All the best to the “Cat’s Claw” crew of volunteers, and to the cats under their care!